A companion volume to Shane Salerno's 2013 documentary of the same name, featured on PBS's American Masters series, this oral biography tells the story of the famously reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, the book that J.D. Salinger wrote in off-hours through some of the worst fighting of World War II.

"Salinger is the thorny, complicated portrait that its thorny, complicated subject deserves.... The book offers the most complete rendering yet of Salinger's World War II service, the transformative trauma that began with the D-Day invasion and carried through the horrific Battle of Hürtgen Forest and the liberation of a Dachau subcamp."—Washington Post